So it has been a while since I last wrote!
To wrap up cairo:
I went to a concert every night (traditional egyptian, funk, reggae, egyptian rock, nubian), met some incredible musicians, jammed every night, slept every day (cause its too damn hot to do anything anyway), played a couple songs with an egyptian popstar "ruby" (similar to "britany"), recorded some tracks for dj samba (check him out on myspace), played with nubian musicians at this park on the nile (pronounced neel), took a couple lessons with arabic violin master alfred gamil, and almost stayed for a really long time (I was there for 10 days).
But I left because i wanted to go back to Israel and work on a kibbutz, and because Cairo is just too nuts of a place to stay for very long.
On my way I climbed Mt. Sinai, the peak of which is the quietest place I have ever been. With the stars incredibly bright I almost felt like I was in outer space.
Neot Semadar (the kibbutz):
wake up at 5am 6 days a week, work until 1pm (with a breakfast break) which among other things included picking apples, pears, plums, figs, olives; making/bottling juice, jam, olives, olive oil, dolce de leche (milk jam) and fruit leather; sorting fruit and packaging it for sale; doing construction work on fountains (laying stones, paving, etc), cooking vegetarian meals; cleaning algae from man made ponds; and working in the kibbutz's restaurant. Then we ate lunch. The afternoon was for sleeping because it is too hot do anything, and we continued to work again from 5 to 8.
It was basically a small zen communist community/cult with silent meals every day and an interesting improv dance in white on shabbat (sabbath). The mindless repetitive nature of the work (putting labels on jars for two hours) was really meditative and my experience of time was very calming. It was hard not knowing hebrew because very few group conversations were in english, though almost everyone could speak decent english. But this motivated me to learn the language which have been doing very quickly.
So I moved on, needed to get back to a big city. Tel Aviv is supposedly the New York of Israel, even though it only has like 600,000. I plan to be here for at least a month so I can take very inexpensive course on hebrew, find the music scene, hang with some musicians I know from my university, and experience urban/secular Israel.
shalom v'ahava,
Lev
